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Nuclear Reactors As Art
Hemos recommends the coverage over at Wired of a project to digitize nuclear reactor art. "Not all nuclear reactors are built alike. Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants, and configurations, a fact beautifully illustrated by a series of reactor wall charts originally published in issues of Nuclear Engineering International during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, the charts have been lovingly collected by Ronald Knief, a nuclear engineer at Sandia National Laboratory. Recently, he completed his collection... and began to digitize the drawings. The first eight out of more than 100 have now been permanently archived online... 'This is not a CAD/CAM-type thing,' Knief said. 'This really is art.'"
For you electronics geeks out there who are into this kind of thing and want some cool posters to decorate your thinking space, There's this, this, , and this which are all made by Synthesys Reasearch. They will send you a poster for free if you ask.
Wired copied this story from io9, who originally brought attention to this blog 4 days ago.
http://io9.com/5429963/know-your-nuclear-reactors-with-illustrated-wall-charts/
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You know that India has had nuclear weapons for many years already?
The biggest risk is a rogue nation acquiring detailed schematics on how to build a warhead from a country that already possesses the technology... Right now, Russia and former USSR member-states are the only plausible sources for this scenario being realized.
Err... have you forgotten about Pakistan? They've got nukes already, and would be far more like to be unstable and also inclined to share with the "rogue states". And if you do some research, you'll find that they were allegedly helped to that point by China (for more details see the background on A.Q. Khan of Pakistan), which might indicate that the threat is not so much from Russia but from China.
India has the raw resources, it's unlikely for cultural and economic reasons that they will develop a nuclear weapons program in the immediate future.
... errrrrr I think you need to do your research again: India's already got a nuclear weapons program.. India's had a nuclear program since 1974. Indeed, it's in reaction too India's nuclear program that Pakistan did whatever it could to develop its own nuclear arsenal, as detailed in the link above.
In fact just make sure you take a look at which countries have nukes before you comment on this again.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
There are a lot of ways to make your point on the internet, and one of them is to not talk about shit you don't know. It's Ad hominem. And yes,seriously, that's a wiki link. If you would deign to look at it you might learn something, like the fact that dakameleon didn't commit an ad hominem. Saying India won't develop nuclear weapons when they already have makes you look like an idiot, and I thought dakameleon let you off lightly.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Not really. You just need to keep the rain out as in the turbine hall of a coal fired power station.
By the time you get that far it's just normal steam. The worst that can happen if a turbine loses a blade is dead people that happened to be close to it and a very big expensive hole in the ground.
*blinks* You can't use a nuclear reactor to build a conventional nuclear device -- the best you'll get is a dirty bomb. You can use a breeder reactor to create fissionable material, but breeder reactors are also useful because they can take many different kinds of fuel and produce power from it, whereas conventional reactors can only use fissile uranium and it degrades to useless and highly toxic byproducts relatively quickly.
*blinks* Oh how you would have failed my fuel cycles class. Plutonium is present in spent fuel from even non-breeder reactors. Though it only represents 1% or so of the spent fuel, there are some potential advantages to using plutonium from spent fuel over highly enriched uranium. Plutonium can be extracted chemically from spent fuel while U235 can not be separated from U238 without enrichment facilities. The process of chemically removing the plutonium requires much less infustructure than enrichment of uranium. That being said, the byproducts are much more of a nuisance. Still, if a country wanted to claim to be using nuclear technology for power while steadily stockpiling weapons grade material, a power reactor and PUREX-like (Plutonium - URanium EXtraction ) reprocessing system would be one way to do it. That is why there have always been such large concerns over PUREX reprocessing.
One type of power reactor could be of particular interest to countries wishing to produce weapons grade material without performan ANY enrichment. Those are natural-uranium reactors which burn un-enriched uranium as their fuel. They require moderation by heavy water though, which tends to offset some of the cost benefits of not requiring enriched material. Still, being able to use only mechanical and chemical processing of uranium ore and leaving out the whole enrichment step does have its advantage. That is probably why India produced its plutonium through chemically reprocessed spent-fuel from a natural uranium reactor (CIRUS). That's also probably why Iran built a heavy water plant near Arak and is currently building a 40MW light-water moderated reactor as well. This is not a power reactor of course but is not particularly special. The reason a reactor like this would be used instead of a larger scale power reactor is because it is much cheaper if you leave off all those multi-million dollar power side components like tubrines and don't have to scale the system up to something that can light a city. To argue that "conventional" reactors can not be used to produce weapons grade fuel is incorrect. While most reactors used to do so are not power reactors, they are also not particularly unconventional in any way that makes them more difficult to build. In fact, they can be built much more cheaply than a power reactor and with a much smaller footprint.
requires exceptionally precise and expensive equipment and a lot of technical know-how to develop several key components to creating a conventional nuclear device.
This part is true enough for some of the more efficient bomb designs like those that evolved from "Fat Man." While one can use a technically simple gun-type bomb with highly-enriched uranium, this is not practical for a plutonium bomb. If a country wants to use plutonium from spent fuel then they must decide between a more technically challenging design with higher efficiency or a simple but low efficiency device like a two-point linear implosion bomb. The latter is not particularly appealing for a large scale and long term weapons program due to the relatively low yield, but has been considered a potential "suite-case nuke" design since it can be built to an extremely small diameter That definately doesn't sound like a design someone worried about terrorism would be concerned with, right?
India has the raw resources, but it's unlikely for cultural and economic reasons that they will develop a nuclear weapons program in the immediate future.
I think the main re
Given that the others mostly use simple trusses or lightweight I-beams, I don't see what there is to be frightened about. Doubly so since you don't need anything more than light construction over the turbine hall.
The math and engineering is well-understood and not technically challenging for a well-funded organization.
It requires exceptionally precise and expensive equipment and a lot of technical know-how to develop several key components to creating a conventional nuclear device. Specifically, the critical function is how to model the compression shock wave in the fissile material that begins the chain reaction.
You're forgetting about "gun type" bombs, which are basically a sawn-off naval cannon, and are so trivial to build that the Americans didn't even bother testing the design before dropping it on Japan.
They were easy to build in the forties, and the only reason they aren't used now is because they're inefficient and too heavy for most launch vehicles.
A rogue state that just wants to build a "few" nukes could easily make these. As long as the intended use was terrorism, and not strategic ICBM warfare, then the weight is not an issue. Several analysts have pointed out that one could simply ship such a weapon to any major city in a standard shipping container, and it's unlikely to be detected, as the gamma radiation scanning devices installed in US ports are trivially defeated by several types of shielding, including the natural Uranium casing used for most gun type bombs!
Just about the only 'hard' part is the purification of Uranium, but even that's getting progressively easier as new techniques are discovered and related industries bring costs down by using the same underlying technologies at a large scale.
By greased palms do you mean handing $150 over to the cashier at a college book store? If you think it should be more restrictive than that, well then you propose a nation with aging nuclear power plants, a nuclear navy, nuclear powered exploration probes (yes, most of the ones that go farther than you can spit do), a growing issue with nuclear waste, an aging and very large nuclear arsenal but almost no nuclear engineers to maintain, upgrade and replace those things.
We already have a hard enough time convincing people to take hard science and engineering majors; nuclear engineering programs themselves are also somewhat scarce and not offered at all engineering colleges. Make the information required to study for this field any less accessible and you'll cut the number of qualified graduates in half.
It's also worth pointing out that these are basically highly stylized piping diagrams. The important components carry little actual information besides what they are in a general sense. The hard part of designing one of these things is setting up and solving the massive systems of equations required to generate detailed specifications (ie erichment levels, material composition, operating temperatures, flow rates, etc. etc.) This is usually done, in the industry and academia, by writing or purchasing and running very complex computer programs that simulate and help optimize the design. Very little information about these non-trivial specifics can be gleamed from these drawings. I mean even if they contained nearly all of those specifics there would still be manufacturing and other issues. Say that you knew, for instance, that the fuel cladding is supposed to be a tube of near-flawless 0.57 mm thick and about 4 m long zircalloy. Do you know how to manufacture that alloy? How about the tubes? They'll fail extremely early if they're even scratched in the slightest. How about building a 12 m tall, 2.5 m thick, 530 T solid fine-grained low alloy ferritic steel pressure vessel clad internally with a more corrosion resistant austenitc stainless steel alloy? Oh what, there's only 3 or so factories in the world that can build those right now in the first place?
So not only is this information (and far far more) already readily available world wide, it also represents almost none of the actual challenges involved in building any of the designs depicted. There are many smaller systems that are well within the technical and infrastructure capabilities of nations like Iran to build. While much simpler and easier to build, they still represent a large financial and political commitment.
Would increased secrecy about the basics of specific nuclear reactor design make nuclear technology more difficult to obtain? No. Can you use increased secrecy about any or all of the information required to design and build a nuclear device to prevent proliferation? Not really. Nuclear science and engineering textbooks from the 70's that I've picked up at used book stores had more useful information in them than these posters in terms of learning what you needed to make a nuclear device, be it a reactor or bomb. The barrier to proliferation is now, and in the forseable future, be the systems involved create a good ammount of time+money+expertise to build. That does mean that any country with the will to spend the time and money and the educated professionals to provide or cultivate the expertise can become nuclear.